In a speech to state leaders, the mayor brands United Teachers Los Angeles as an obstacle to reform as the city stands at 'a critical crossroads.'

With a hard-hitting speech that branded the city's teachers union as an unyielding obstruction to education reforms, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa set the stage this week for a new battle over control of the troubled Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation's second-largest.

In a Sacramento address to state leaders, Villaraigosa — himself a longtime teachers union employee before launching a career in public office — declared that education in Los Angeles stands at "a critical crossroads," and he assailed United Teachers Los Angeles for resisting change.

During the last five years, the mayor said, union leaders have stood as "one unwavering roadblock to reform." He called for change in contentious areas such as tenure, teacher evaluations and seniority — all volatile arenas in which teachers unions have balked at proposals for reform as eroding their rights.

"At every step of the way, when Los Angeles was coming together to effect real change in our public schools, UTLA was there to fight against the change and slow the pace of reform," Villaraigosa declared at a forum of the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan think tank.

The mayor had been at odds with the teachers union for years but had never until now called the union out so vociferously. He left no doubt he had consciously embarked on a new campaign that could define his administration before he leaves office in 2013.

"I knew it would cause a firestorm," Villaraigosa said in an interview Thursday, two days after the speech.

"I knew that if I said it at one of my partnership schools, it would go unnoticed," he said, referring to a nonprofit group that runs 15 schools under the mayor's control.

Furious union representatives denounced the mayor's comments as those of a turncoat who seemed to ignore the pernicious effects of state budget cuts and had joined in a union-bashing chorus once associated with conservative Republicans. Some seemed bewildered at what they considered a betrayal from Villaraigosa, who defines himself as a "progressive" politician and man of the left.

"Pointing fingers and laying blame does not help improve our schools," UTLA President A.J. Duffy said in a terse statement. "UTLA will continue our partnership with all parties to overcome the devastating effects of the budget cuts on the education program for our students."

The mayor's words come at a crucial juncture: By spring, the 680,000-student district will have a new superintendent, Duffy will step down as head of UTLA and a majority of the seven school board members will be up for election. The candidate filing deadline was Wednesday, and the mayor and the union are beginning to pick sides.

Nationally, the Obama administration is pressing for the same kind of reforms that Villaraigosa championed in his speech.

"All of these changes create a real opportunity for us to focus on solutions and to stop talking about whether we are going to move forward but how we are going to move forward," said Ted Mitchell, president of the California Board of Education. "Rigor, high expectations and the transparent use of data in everything from performance evaluations to individual instruction have got to be supported now at the local level. That's the reform position and should be rigorously pursued."

The mayor, in the interview, said his speech reflected years of frustration and his conviction that an opportunity was finally at hand.

"I believe that California, and in particular Los Angeles, have an opportunity to be the epicenter for education reform across the nation," Villaraigosa said.

Taking matters a step further, the mayor accused the teachers union of using its ample political clout to blunt talk of meaningful change.

"The most powerful defenders of the status quo are the teachers' unions," Villaraigosa said. "They intimidated people, especially Democrats, from doing anything about reform."

Teachers' representatives insist the union has been at the forefront of reforms, such as efforts to reduce the number of students per classroom.

Villaraigosa's agenda threatens to "turn back the clock on historic gains made in public education," removing due process for teachers and switching to a system of evaluation for teachers that is subjective, not objective, said Joshua Pechthalt, UTLA's vice president.

"We reject the notion that real reform has to come at the expense of the rights of teachers and other educators," Pechthalt said. "All of these reforms are part of a vision that suggests the interests of children, and the people who work with them, are best served by a competition that exists in the marketplace," he added. "And we have seen how disastrous that competition has played out on Wall Street."